Gilbert Arenas has put down his Twitter gun. If you went to @Agentzeroshow on Wednesday, you got, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist.”

You should be sorry it ever did.

Arenas didn’t just ruin what was little was left of his reputation. The washed-up Orlando guard became Exhibit A in the case for Twitter censorship.

The C word conjures visions of book burnings and dictators shutting down Facebook to quell rebellions. We’re not big fans of that in America, but there are consequences to unbridled freedom. In this case, one rogue agent is helping drag down a burgeoning outlet of expression.

Arenas turned freedom of Twitter expression into an art form. At least if you consider Hustler magazine a form of art.

Most fans don’t, and teams are aware of that. They have always had a healthy paranoia when it comes to image. If it were up to most coaches, everything a player said would be first run through the Sports Information Sanitization Machine.

Twitter has become the Great Satan to the message-control freaks. A few college coaches have banned it, and a couple dozen more have hired UDiligence. It’s a program that monitors Facebook and Twitter accounts for potentially embarrassing messages.

It has a Big Brother feel. If Reggie Bush had been banned from tweeting, you wouldn’t have read his musings during the NFL lockout.

“Right about now we would be slaving in 100 degree heat, practicing twice a day, while putting our bodies at risk for nothing.”

Bush caught a lot of grief for that, but what was the real harm? Give me an honest opinion over a robotic quote any day.

In keeping with Twitter tradition, Bush said he was just joking and that people should lighten up. I don’t know about the first part, but he’s right about people lightening up.

Most of the thousands of daily jock tweets are harmless. The danger is the next time a GM or athletic director devises a Twitter policy they’ll have visions of Agent Zero dancing in their heads.

Or maybe they just need to get a sense of humor. Here was Arenas’ farewell tweet to his 51,000 followers:

“so i would like to do my thx u’s now…to all the fan’s that has humor in their lives thx u for understanding my approach to twitte and for the ppl who just got pissed off and took my tweets too serious U NEED 101 HUMOR HELP u can laugh its okay.”

In other words, "WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?"

Shouldn’t you bust a gut when a guy writes about his sexual exploits? Here are a couple of glimpses into Arenas' funny mind:

“I’m the only athlete that’s never cheated on his girl…but I did practice a lot...to be good at anything u need practice…. So my girl was the GAME and I had practice girls… cmon ppl we all know practice makes perfect.”

I’d say he’s joking, but there was plenty more where that came from. When it comes to treatment of women, Arenas makes Cro-Magnon Man look like Prince William. Cro-Magnon at least had the decency never to tweet about sending a woman home after having sex with her, even if she might be too drunk to drive.

Those stuffed shirts at NBA headquarters fined Arenas an undisclosed amount in June, but it didn’t seem to deter him. And to be fair, @Agentzeroshow wasn’t all caveman quality.

Arenas asked a trivia question every day and gave the winner a pair of sneakers. I’d like to think that accounts for his 51,000 followers, but I fear most were amused by his views on life.

Either that or they figured it was less painful to read his tweets than watch him play basketball. There was one genuinely hilarious part to Arenas’ tweeting.

His ex-fiancee is set to appear on “Basketball Wives LA.” Arenas sued to keep her from doing the show, claiming his family life should not be publicly aired.

The judge last week rejected the suit. He found it hard to square Gilbert’s need for privacy with the “tens of thousands of Twitter users who follow (him) as he tweets about a variety of mundane occurrences.”

The judge should have paraphrased a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln and others:

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to tweet out and remove all doubt.”